Respite
December 11, 2007
Twenty-four hours ago I wasn’t happy. Thick in the middle of an exam on law and journalism, my head was deep in supreme court rulings. NYT v. Sullivan, Cohen v. Cowles, Bartniki, Food Lion, Shulman, Sanders, the list goes on. These cases outline the borders of how press can function under the freedoms afforded by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. They parse the instances where the press can intrude upon privacy.
It is a state province, for example, as to how many participants in a conversation are needed to permit recording of that conversation.
In New York, only one party in a conversation, over the phone say, must be aware of the taping. In California, all parties must agree.
This and other types of cases, mostly on the rights of the press to publish particular information, and the rights of citizens in balance with the press, has been a riveting experience in furious constitutional law. And it all ended this weekend, today, in fact, when I emailed my final exam (a take home affair taking a dozen or so hours) to the vigilant teaching assistant.
In fact, the semester is pretty much over. RWI, the lifeblood of the first semester, ended with an in-depth profile of a real estate grand dame in the Bronx. Techniques of Feature Writing, which I thought had a light workload, but offered some valuable information on the business side of life as a journalist - like visits with editors from Esquire and and a writer from the New Yorker, ended a couple of weeks ago with a feature story on a zen beekeeper on City Island, a tiny place off the Bronx Shore in the Long Island Sound.
The last class to end will do so tomorrow, with another take home exam. Critical Issues, the ethics course at Columbia, comes to an end with a written exam taking material from the semester, material like the story of Nelliie Blythe, who feigned insanity to write an undercover story about asylums. Or the editor who made up a visit to a murder, or the photographer who offed himself after shooting a famous pic. We talked about George Bush and his historic ineptitude, Israel and the Palestinians, 9/11, Nazis, the Viet Cong, and countless other instances in which the ethics of the journalists whose work now informs history impacted the world, and the journalists.
Our last discussion in our Critical Issues class - the discussion section, which meets after the general lecture in the top floor of the journalism building, in an attic-shaped computer lab, at a long white table - regarded whether it was okay to buy a source drinks while working. The answer was surprisingly different. Well, let me be more precise. The question was, can you socialize with a source? Now, that is, yes, a bit different that the previous question. My answer would be maybe.
As to the beer-buying, I think it’s fine. Many did not. One astute young fellow said it was absolutely not right to let your guard down to a source, which did not necessarily preclude drinking or buying drinks. His point wasn’t well made, despite being a good point, and the next ten minutes consisted of the predictable grad school debate that started off missing the point.
But hey, people were talking.
In the end, ethics as we were taught at Columbia this, the first semester of the Master of Science program, are a personal thing. We’ve learned a lot about what not to do out there, in the field, in the action. but what to do is the far more important question. I’ve figured a little bit of that so far. I get the feeling, though, that it won’t be a finished process by graduation. Actually, it may never be finished at all.
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